Teachers Pay Teachers
Adam Cole School of Music
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Nuncici Press
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 95
Copyright: 2017
Price: $12.99 (eBook)
Teach elementary research skills with fun cooperative learning games around music history!
More and more, even in elementary school, students are expected to make use of critical thinking. Music history provides students with insights into general history, research, and language skills. So why is music history rarely taught in elementary school?
The demands on music educators are formidable. They may have classes of up to 60 children whom they see for only 30 or 40 minutes, once a week. In this time, under these conditions, they are expected to cover a vast curriculum including music reading, sight-singing, instrumental technique, vocabulary, improvisation and movement. It is difficult to fit music history into this mix.
Adopt A Composer is an innovative way to teach music history in the elementary grades. The activities are designed to fit into a crowded school-year schedule. Each individual lesson can be done cooperatively in a fifteen-minute segment. Taken together, the activities form an arc which connects the lessons into a year-long project, assisting the students’ retention of what they are learning.
Rather than exposure, Adopt A Composer is slow immersion. The well-thought out sequence is reasonable in its use of classroom time. Best of all, at the end of the year, students will know much more about composers and the times in which they lived.
Excerpt
Introduction
If we think about it, music history is probably among the most neglected subjects taught in our schools. It’s also potentially the one that would be most interesting to the kids. Like history, music history offers stories of times long ago where people wore different clothes, talked differently, ate differently. It takes us to places far away like France, Argentina, or China. There are amazing tales of child prodigies and heart wrenching tragedies. And on top of it all, there’s the music to bring these stories to life!
On the surface, it’s easy to offer students something in the subject of music history. There are plenty of composer-biographies to have them read, plenty of movies about the composers, plenty of activity sheets for them to complete, word searches, crossword puzzles.
But in the end, what do the children remember?
We can do more. And we can do it in just a few minutes a class. Adopt a Composer was designed with the needs of the teacher and the students in mind: Short, meaningful activities that are fun, that are age appropriate, and that will truly teach.
Adopt A Composer is an innovative way to offer music history in the elementary grades. The activities are designed to fit into a crowded school-year schedule. Each individual lesson can be done cooperatively in a fifteen-minute segment. Taken together, the activities form a year-long project which reinforces the students’ retention of what they are learning.
These lessons are best begun in the second or third grade when many children can write comfortably. It helps if your students have access to the internet, have a little parental support, and are willing to do a tiny bit of work on their own, but the lessons are designed as classroom experiences, not homework experiences. If a student can’t or won’t work at home, they’ll get what they need in class.
It’s time to Adopt a Composer!
Week 1-9: Choosing a Composer
The activities of the first nine weeks involve ways to help children make a choice about which composer they want to adopt. At the end of this segment, the children will have picked a composer to study, and will have some idea about what comes next. Our pace and expectations are very modest at the beginning because we want to keep the tasks achievable for the greatest number of students.
Chapter 1 – First Choices
In the first few weeks of the year, when the students are still cooperative and curious and the parents are still paying attention to what comes home, we set the foundation for a good experience by having the kids make an active decision: who do they want to learn about?
Letting the child choose a composer isn’t all that revolutionary, but it sets the stage for a series of other choices that they’re going to make all year round. To the extent that it’s possible, we’re going to ask them what they want to know, and we’re going to tell them how to find out.
So the first step is to pick a composer.
On the second or third week, send a letter home with the kids stating that this year, your students will be adopting a composer. The letter should include:
Limitations on which composers they can pick.
A deadline by which the composer must be chosen.
A way for parents to contact you if there are questions.
Instructions for parents to print the child’s name on the return letter, and sign the letter. This is most important, so you know which children have followed instructions.
For my letter, I have asked the children to choose a composer who was born before 1900. It will be much easier for the students to find accurate, verifiable information about composers in this date-range. If you choose to let your students explore jazz or contemporary figures, make sure you have a reliable source of information and be ready to screen their choices for inappropriate lyrics and subject matter. I’ve also asked the children do the choosing, though some parents will decide to select a composer for their kids.
Even though I’ve specified clearly that the child only needs to choose a composer by October 8th, many parents and students will mistakenly believe they are to bring in information, or do a report on the composer by this date. Be as clear as you can about this when passing out the letter!
There will always be some students who lose the letter, or choose not to present it to their parents. As in all the Adopt a Composer lessons, we are prepared with a contingency plan. Let the students know that if they miss the deadline, you will have a list of composers waiting for them, and they can choose one in class.
For the purposes of Adopt a Composer, it is perfectly acceptable, and even desirable, that several students may choose the same composer. In fact, they may all choose the same composer! The lessons that follow will still work under these circumstances and in some cases will be even more interesting.
However, if you prefer that each student choose a unique composer, you may want to forego the letter completely and let the students choose off a list in class. If you do, you’ll need some kind of fair way to decide who gets first pick, who gets second, and so forth. Perhaps you can play a music-game, and the winner will get first pick. After choosing, the winner may decide who gets second pick, the second chooser decides on a third, and so forth.
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